I estimate the impacts of recently-popular U.S. state film incentives on filming location, film industry employment, wages, and establishments, and spillover impacts on related industries. I compile a detailed database of incentives, matching this with TV series and feature film data from the...

In the standard neoclassical model consumers use all the available information and the demand for goods depends exclusively on preferences and prices whereas other spurious information do not play any role. In the market for books, we investigate if - in contrast to the standard model - the...

This paper examines the role of local TV market structure in US congressional politics, exploiting variation in the overlaps of political markets and TV markets. Local TV stations are hypothesized to report relatively more per US House representative in less populous markets (where the number of...

Asymmetric information between voters and legislative representatives poses a major challenge to the functioning of representative democracy. We examine whether representatives are more likely to serve long-term campaign donors instead of constituents during times of low media attention to...

Can media coverage of a terrorist organization encourage their execution of further attacks? This paper analyzes the day-to-day news coverage of Al-Qaeda on US television since 9/11 and the group's terrorist strikes. To isolate causality, I use disaster deaths worldwide as an exogenous variation...

We study the impact of the first American party committed to redistribution from rich to poor on anti-Black media content in the 1890s. The Populist Party sought support among poor farmers, regardless of race, providing the segregationist Democratic establishment in the South with an incentive...

We investigate women's underrepresentation among holders of commercialized patents: only 5.5% of holders of such patents are female. Using the National Survey of College Graduates 2003, we find only 7% of the gap in patenting rates is accounted for by women's lower probability of holding any...

This paper examines the effects of foreign- and native-born STEM graduates and non-STEM graduates on patent intensity in U.S. metropolitan areas. I find that both native and foreign-born STEM graduates significantly increase metropolitan area patent intensity, but college graduates in non-STEM...

When investing in research and development (R&D), institutions must decide whether to take a top-down approach - soliciting a particular technology - or a bottom-up approach in which innovators suggest ideas. This paper examines a reform to the U.S. Air Force Small Business Innovation Research...

In this paper we show that the patenting behavior of creative entrepreneurs is correlated with the patenting behavior of their fathers, which we refer to as a source of the entrepreneurs' human capital endowments. Our argument for this relationship follows from established theories of...